Running Linux, Third Edition

Graphics

Many people are fascinated by computer graphics. Computers are being used to create photo-realistic images of surreal scenes or fractally generated images of mountain ridges with lakes and valleys; to change images by bending, polishing, aging them; or to make any other manipulations.

Linux does not need to step shyly aside when it comes to graphics. It can do just about anything that other computing environments can do, and in some areas, like dealing with many graphics files at the same time, it even excels. The X Window System, described in the next chapter, forms a very good base for bitmapped graphics, while hardware support will eventually arrive for 3D graphics conforming to the OpenGL standard.

However, working with graphics on Linux is often different from what you might be used to from other operating systems; the Unix model of small, interoperating tools is in effect here, too. This philosophy is be illustrated most clearly with the suite of graphics manipulation programs ImageMagick that we will describe here. ImageMagick is a collection of tools that operate on graphics files and are started from the command line or from shell scripts. Imagine that you have two thousand files of one file format that you want to reduce to 256 colors, slant, and convert to another file format. On Linux, this is only a few lines in a shell script. Now imagine doing this on Windows: Click on the File menu, click on the Open menu entry, select a file, select an operation, specify ...